Martian Cryosphere Workshop |Wrozław | 10-12 February 2014

Periglacial Geomorphology of the Northern Lowlands of Mars: Results from Vastitas Borealis

E. Hauber (DLR), van Gasselt, S. (FU Berlin), Reiss, D. (WWU Münster), Johnsson, A. (Univ. Gothenburg), Balme, M.R., Conway, S.J., Costard, F., Gallagher, C., Kereszturi, A., Platz, T., Séjourné, A., Skinner, J.A., Jr., Swirad, Z..

The Martian lowlands cover almost a third of the planet’s surface and display a diverse inventory of possible periglacial landforms. These include patterned ground, topographic depressions that may have formed by thermokarst or sublimation processes, and solifluction lobes. The processes that created these landforms were partly linked with the deposition of one or several generations of mantling deposits consisting of a mixture of dust and ice. A newly formed International Team supported by the International Space Science Institute (ISSI) in Bern (CH) will investigate the periglacial history of the northern lowlands in three N-S traverses across the huge basins of Utopia, Arcadia, and Acidalia (see abstract by Ramsdale et al., this workshop). In this study, we report on mapping results from the Vastitas Borealis region, between the Acidalia Colles in the south and the North Polar Cap.